Palit officially announces RTX 3060 return with ‘new’ Infinity 2 OC launch — 2021 GPU with 12GB of VRAM is an AI crisis stopgap

Nvidia has just relaunched its five-year-old graphics card, the GeForce RTX 3060, in order to combat the component scarcity driven by AI. This resurrection has seen a staggered release, with companies like Gigabyte and Manli silently listing their renewed variants in different parts of the world. Today, Palit joined the list with an official announcement for its RTX 3060 Infinity 2 OC, the first official indication of Ampere’s return.

If we take a look at the specs, the card is identical to the original RTX 3060 we saw in 2021 — it has 3,584 CUDA cores paired with 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM saturated across a 192-bit-wide bus. Since this is an overclocked variant, it can boost up to 1,792 MHz, which is less than 1% higher than the base 1,777 MHz boost that Nvidia already mandates. Palit will also release a non-OC variant of the Infinity 2 RTX 3060.

The card features a relatively simple design characterized by the typical black aesthetic we see on budget GPUs. There’s no zero-RPM tech here, but Palit claims 0dB noise levels and says there’s a “protective backplate” on the card that prevents PCB flex. When you’re buying a GPU like this, its looks are probably the least of your concern; the main selling point is, of course, that 12GB memory pool.

Late last year, the PC hardware industry entered one of its most turbulent eras, characterized by production inadequacies created by the AI boom. Artificial intelligence demands a lot of memory and storage, and thus, commodity silicon has skyrocketed in price overnight with no signs of slowing down. After evading the crisis initially, GPUs eventually got wrapped up in the price hikes as well.

Nvidia’s latest Blackwell family uses cutting-edge GDDR7 memory, which is even more expensive, and since vendors are busy producing HBM for fatter margins instead, the “solution” to this dilemma had to be creative. The idea for reviving older generation cards was actually floated by our very own Paul Acorn at a Q&A at CES 2026, where Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang replied, saying he’d “go back and take a look at this.”

Palit hasn’t provided a price for the Infinity 2 OC yet, and we didn’t see it listed on retailers yet, but we can infer it’ll cost $329 given similar variants have also been popping up for that price. To be clear, the RTX 3060 is a great value GPU that we praised even back when it launched. But in the face of the RTX 50-series, it’s not exactly something you should consider first, especially when buying new.

You can get an RTX 5060 Ti for just $369 right now on Newegg, which is a significantly faster card with support for DLSS 4.5 and multi-frame gen, not to mention the better efficiency. It only has 8GB of VRAM, unfortunately, which hurts performance at high resolutions and if you like to play with ray tracing enabled. Still, unless you’re going up to 4K, the 5060 Ti (and the regular 5060) will perform much better than a 3060 no matter what, as you can see in our GPU benchmark hierarchy.

Ultimately, rebooting the RTX 3060 makes sense from a manufacturer’s point of view given the better yields of Samsung’s older 8nm process compared to TSMC’s more expensive N5 node used by Ada and Blackwell. But as a consumer, you should definitely stick with the RTX 50-series or try to find a used RTX 40-series GPU instead.